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The Not-So-Raging Middle Class

By Stacey Baker April 10, 2012 3:37 pmApril 10, 2012 3:37 pm

Simon Roberts

In 2010, when Simon Roberts began photographing protests around England, it was the protesters’ homemade signs that most intrigued him. He set about creating a visual archive of the individual signs (seen above and below) about 250 of which will appear in his exhibition titled “Let This Be a Sign,” which opens at the Swiss Cottage Gallery on May 23 as part of the London Festival of Photography.

Roberts and I discussed his project recently. Here are some of the points he made about the series:

On how the project came about:

It follows on from the two major bodies of work I’ve done over the last five years – We English and The Election Project. I decided it would be valuable to continue to look at the British landscape but through the prism of economics – how the cuts the government is pushing through are affecting Britain today.

A lot of what has happened is hitting the middle class. Of course, this is a very difficult subject to visualize. We’re not seeing the bread lines and kinds of pictures that Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans made back in the 1930s or images like those Paul Graham made of unemployment offices around England in the early 1980s.

The protest poster is something that’s been around for two centuries. It’s an important way of conveying people’s anger or ideas. But the use of homemade placards by individuals has not historically been a part of demonstrations and is quite a recent development. Although there were a small number of homemade banners at early trade-union protests, most signage was made professionally, and mostly by a single company. They were very homogenous in style, reflecting the collective nature of the union movement. In some ways the recent appearance of the homemade placard suggests that while an individual is happy to march for a specific cause they remain outside formal political organizations.

Slide Show

On the signs themselves:

In a quite spontaneous manner they’re actually using bits of cardboard, scraps of wood, painting their messages and then discarding them. They’re seen as temporary. But in this age of social media, where photographs are circulated almost instantaneously, protesters are able to share their image holding their placard to a much wider audience as if to say, ‘I was there.’ There is this intriguing interplay between the two.

There’s something actually quite gentle and polite about many of the messages. There’s an underlying element of British humor, but also in a number of cases, they feel almost middle class – they’re not raging anger. They’re not these big statements that they hope to get in tomorrow’s newspaper. In the past, the protest poster was very much about a term or a series of words, which they hoped a journalist would pick up to use in the newspapers, a kind of tagline if you like. Now of course photography is ubiquitous which may be why some of the imagery is quite playful because if they are photographed they do kind of look quite interesting.

On the discarded posters Roberts collected:

I’ve got a few hundred, and I will probably try and get them into an archive. There are a number of institutions in the U.K. that collect protest signs as a historic record. For instance, there’s the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, in which, alongside their extensive library, they have a very large archive of newspapers, posters, stickers, all kinds related to the labor movement. I think it’s important that some of these are actually kept as physical objects, not just my photographs.

Simon RobertsThe Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.) at a national demonstration against government cuts in London, March 26, 2011.

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